Jonathan Stalling’s YÍNGĒLÌSHI (Yingelishi) is a book of poetry that is read in two ways: in Chinese and in English. He offers a line of Chinese poetry, then translates in into English, He then rewrites the English line phonetically in Mandarin Chinese, so that the new line in Chinese has its own unique and coherent meaning, which is then translated back into English. The end result is a poem existing in multiple languages and in no language at all, with multiple meanings that can be read many ways.
[Image ID: A line that reads, “早上好” which is Simplified Chinese for “good morning.” Then a line of English text that reads, “good morning,” followed by a line of pinyin or possibly a different method of transliterated Chinese that reads, “gũ dé mào níng.” Then a line of Chinese characters which reads, “孤德貌宁,” phonically the same as the above pinyin, followed by a line of English text which is the translation of the above Chinese, reading, “Even alone, the moral one / appears peaceful.” End image ID.]
Most English readers became familiar with Mo Yan after he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature—with this prize, however, came assumptions, based on a poorly translated remark, that the writer was silent against the status quo and thus complicit with it. Mo Yan Speaks shows, however, that, far from being silent, Mo Yan has spoken at great length about many topics. Below are five…
[Editors' Note: This inaugurates a series of posts on different forms of parenthood. A. BRADSTREET maintains two ideas: 1. motherhood is not determined by biological givens; and 2. a rethinking of the poetics of motherhood must involve a revision of the poetics of parenthood in general, particularly that of fatherhood. Welcome to the new year!]
by Jonathan Stalling
The space of parent-being in my case is characterized by a recurrent tidal pulling between home, work and traveling (I do travel quite a bit as a lecturer, poet and editor) making my experience quite different from my wife’s or, for that matter, my parents’. I was raised by my mother, who is also an artist, and her art, like Amy’s, has gone through long periods of being awashed with parent-being. And I cannot speak to this full emersion experience because my experience is one constellated by this pulled space, a stretched being that pools and pulls while always remaining totally and radically plural. Yet a plurality inside a displaced geography is one dispersed in a way that is contingently, situatedly the space “I” come to be within, or as, it. Looking back at my “Lodge” poems, which I will talk about at some length in a moment, I can now see that they were shaped by this pulling even early on. But as I begin to reflect on this poetics, I feel my position of enunciation as a thick presence undergirding so much of what follows, and feel that my experience may make my “lodge” vulnerable to abstraction, to a poetics precisely because certain outsides may appear, if only momentary and peripheral in the psychic stretch between home and work, or as I travel, and this idea appears even in the early lodge poems before our children were born:
Love is spelled like a kind of distance,
Means in most cases what distance means
When flown into becoming the space of us.
This notion that love is a traversal of a perceived space as it becomes shaped into a plural being is something I am still puzzling over. Now I think that the plurality does not require a crossing of space even figuratively, but that space can make it more apprhendable. The pulling of plural being, as felt in romantic love, has its own shapes in parental love or “parent-being.” So I feel the poems that follow from “Lodge” are not to be taken as a “poetics” in the sense that they may speak to any kind of ontology or fixable sense of what fatherhood “is” or even “feels like” (though I would hope that “poetics” would necessarily contradict such fixities) but I do believe the work that follows does so from within the matrix of my particular parent-being.
Lodge-Revisited:
The last sequence of poems in in my book Grotto Heaven (Chax Press 2010) pursues a way of imagining the interplay of self/other within what I perceive to be the immersive, racially non-dual experience of parenthood. The first two portions of that book explores otherness in language and phenomena, but the third explores differentia within the self, what I imagine to be a displaced geography of a parent-self as it becomes increasingly heterogeneous with the advent of children entering the aggregate of this plural “I.” The poems begin in Edinburgh, Scotland (where my wife and I first lived together and where our son Isaac grew through his embryonic months). The poems then trace out the arch of our move to the Chicago land area; Buffalo, New York where our daughter Eliana was born; and to Norman, Oklahoma, where we all began to grow a bit older together and still are. In this sequence of poems I hoped to trace something of the diffusion of the “I” into the aggregate of a plural, socially constituted self within the co-presence of my wife and children. I had spent some time searching through our culture’s offerings on the subject of parenthood (and love, more generally), which left me with a sense that the so-called domestic space, within which these tend to be coded, did not seem to reflect my experience, so I wanted (and still do) to open a poetics of a familial “love/being” both existentially and aesthetically in a generative way that felt akin to life I was experiencing. I hinged this work on the notion of “lodge,” a term that seems to account for my sense of fatherhood (and husbandhood).
Here is the short introduction and the poems from the “lodge” section of Grotto Heaven:
Sequence Three: Lodge·· 宿 departs from the theme of relating to the unknown by way of leaning toward it, past a return to a unified, knowing self by acknowledging the already plural relations at “home.” Here the term lodge is explored as another measure of attending to relations already always within the self’s space. As a noun lodge is a small usually temporary dwelling, (a tent, arbor, hotel or the like); it is a place of sojourn, a place to accommodate, or a collection of objects ‘lodged’ or situated close to each other. In this sense, I want to explore the self as such a constellation or aggregate, of tightly packed relations lodged in temporary shelters. As a verb the term denotes extending hospitality, receiving others into one’s home, providing habitation, harbor or seeking shelter in or from another. Such a verb is less an action taken, than an action already taken. Becoming aware of this, however, is awakening to dependence, and in that sense, the ethics of being. The first two sequences may suggest a mysticism that moves away from the traditional desire for an identity with divinity and the certainty, knowledge, vision, and power such an identity would mobilize. But here (in the third sequence) one no longer needs to leave for relations to emerge. Lodged, we appear in the half-light, as multiple, shifting configuration of relations with(in) others. In Chinese, lodge 宿 is both the verb “to lodge” for the night (xiǔ), a lodge (as in hotel) and the ancient word for a celestial constellation (xiù): The poems in this sequence explore the contingent withness of this being.
The Compiler, Norman, OK, 2009
While I have written more poetry in the lodge series since 2007, my initial discomfort with writing “about” our family remains as strong as ever, and I am still processing the newer work and may indefinitely, or until the moment I’m not. I was always uncomfortable with the notion of thematizing the “them/us.” Even poems that feel open and buoyant in the way I need them to be, something of a path in them still points away from the dynamic mystery of their/our being into something other than what it is.
So, as something of a conclusion, I would mention that one of the things about writing into/out of the space of fatherhood, is that the poetry may perhaps too often trip/skip into celebratory registers that complicate their page-feel as poetry (too light perhaps), or swing too far in the other direction, as the terror of our vulnerabilities take hold. In short, lodge appears to me as the woven space of feeling filaments, a nerve enwrapped impossible “whole,” a flailing miraculous aggregate impossible to shield in perfect safety, that leaves one with the joy of being (with/in others) and an unmet (fierce) longing for their health, joy and a light-enfolded sublime safety. The prayer for this recited infinitely within the unconscious and verbally at a child’s bedside has revealed to me, anyhow, a basic heliotropic instinct within plural being. And while joy pervades my life at the cellular level, I also know I live as a body with organs that are not my own, but belong to the mysterious walkers of other pathways (always so radically free) that at any moment, the “I” that writes these words, can disappear entirely, lost to another’s time line. And yet life keeps showing me, day by day, that fatherhood, like the rest of it, leaves something astonishingly like a “me” intact. Still this is the “constellated lodge” that drew me to the term “liu,” as a figure for parenthood, to be the aggregated lights deep inside the Grotto Heaven (which as a book ends with the poem: “Friends, We are constellations for a night, then disappear in the light.”)
A selection of poems from “Lodge” (excerpted from Grotto Heaven):
Supplanted
Here among us
the I is an outflow
The experience of staring
mirrored
in the glassweave
less bound
to the wavefall of light
than shifting rudderless
than ambiguously edged
than stubbornly expressed waves
caught in the act of falling
The Space
Opened by your voice
or the I that takes place here
isn’t one without it
The movement and event
of the sounding itself
is the lodge
the taking place of us
appears here in the encounter
which opens as our own
A self is a rupture in awareness
housing windows
bridging the echo’s return
and forgetting the mirror’s immensity
polishing cannot vanish
the obscure approach
Becoming the chamber
of a self isn’t a place or presence
just the name of returning to or from
the sound of your voice
A ripple in the words
Or an opening beneath them
is small enough
for children to take place
To overtake communication
the rupture itself
becomes the very heart of the world
The countless garden is the ease
of loving them
Munster-Norman
------------------------------
small
legs
running
a continuum
of wing
wobbling
light
What a thing!
we don’t have children
Anymore than the atmosphere
Buffalo-Norman
------------------------------
In the half dark
She is pure current
Ecstatic blue flame
nearing syntax
in half formed words
I am made of her language
I can’t wait to poor cereal
into her chipped green bowl
Norman
------------------------------
Celestial,
leaf
his eyes are more than I can handle
his laughing is an outside of my own mind
emerging continual rupture
only one thing more frightening
than listening to the stammer
murmuring
small silvery insects
in their chests
cellophane wings
almost light
what does it mean?
no shore
or cusp
to them
less a shelter
than
everything
open to chance
Norman
------------------------------
We can’t gather each other
into the cotton sieve
of a gentler interpretation
or wrap this withness
into a tissue of unvoiced fricatives
we are not quietly decidable
sound or noise
we are barely the possibility of
consonants
vanishing
into becoming
each other’s
swift
unsayable
candle
Norman
------------------------------
Jonathan Stalling lives in Norman, Oklahoma, with his wife Amy and children-- Isaac, Eliana, and Rowen (and lots of animals). When not at home (which is where he spends almost all days after 5 and every weekend) he is an Associate Professor of English at OU specializing in American Poetry, East-West Poetics, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies and is the co-founder and editor of the Chinese Literature Today magazine and book series (University of Oklahoma Press) and the "21st Century North American-Chinese Literature Research and Translation Series” (21世纪北美中国文学研究著译丛书) published by China’s Academy of Social Sciences Press. His books include Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham University Press), Grotto Heaven (Chax Press), Yingelishi (Counterpath Press), Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi (Oklahoma University Press), and he is an editor of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Fordham UP). Stalling’s opera Yingelishi (吟歌丽诗) was performed at Yunnan University in 2010, and Winter Sun is presently a finalist for the National Translation Award.
